The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups [Paperback]

Ron Rosenbaum (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 8, 2008

“[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.”
–David Remnick

In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler, he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. He gives us a Shakespeare book like no other. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare’s enchantment and illumination–the astonishing language itself. How best to unlock the secrets of its spell?

With quicksilver wit and provocative insight, Rosenbaum takes readers into the midst of fierce battles among the most brilliant Shakespearean scholars and directors over just how to delve deeper into the Shakespearean experience–deeper into the mind of Shakespeare.

Was Shakespeare the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love? Or was he rather–as an embattled faction of textual scholars now argues–a different kind of writer entirely: a conscientious reviser of his greatest plays? Must we then revise our way of reading, staging, and interpreting such works as Hamlet and King Lear?

Rosenbaum pursues key partisans in these debates from the high tables of Oxford to a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a strip mall in the Deep South. He makes ostensibly arcane textual scholarship intensely seductive–and sometimes even explicitly sexual. At an academic “Pleasure Seminar” in Bermuda, for instance, he examines one scholar’s quest to find an orgasm in Romeo and Juliet. Rosenbaum shows us great directors as Shakespearean scholars in their own right: We hear Peter Brook–perhaps the most influential Shakespearean director of the past century–disclose his quest for a “secret play” hidden within the Bard’s comedies and dramas. We listen to Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as he launches into an impassioned, table-pounding fury while discussing how the means of unleashing the full intensity of Shakespeare’s language has been lost–and how to restore it. Rosenbaum’s hilarious inside account of “the Great Shakespeare ‘Funeral Elegy’ Fiasco,” a man-versus-computer clash, illustrates the iconic struggle to define what is and isn’t “Shakespearean.” And he demonstrates the way Shakespearean scholars such as Harold Bloom can become great Shakespearean characters in their own right.

The Shakespeare Wars offers a thrilling opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s work at its deepest levels. Like Explaining Hitler, this book is destined to revolutionize the way we think about one of the overwhelming obsessions of our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Acclaimed journalist Rosenbaum, New York Observer columnist and cultural omnivore (Explaining Hitler), conveys the impassioned arguments of leading directors and scholars concerning how Shakespeare should be printed and performed. "Hearing Sir Peter Hall pound his fists in fury over the vital importance of a pause at the close of a pentameter line, for instance—wonderful!" Rosenbaum enthuses. Elsewhere he recalls how seeing Peter Brook's definitive 1970 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired Rosenbaum's "outsider's odyssey into the innermost citadels of scholarship" to investigate the painstaking work of Shakespearean textual experts as they convert the Bard's earliest published works into authoritative editions. Evoking the clashing methodologies and discourses of scholars, the dizzying depths of lexicographic databases and a rare instance of Shakespeare's voice transcribed in a court proceeding, Rosenbaum captures with clarity and wry humor the obsessive fervor, theoretical about-turns and occasional scholarly fiasco that characterize this arcane world. He considers the politics of portraying Shylock and Falstaff, appraises Shakespeare on film and provocatively comments on the work of such influential critics as Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Booth. Balancing academic reportage with his own lively observations, Rosenbaum wrestles with the weightiest issues of Shakespeare studies in a down-to-earth manner that readers will applaud. (Sept. 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Ron Rosenbaum, whose analysis in Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil (1998) was well received, is a journalist by trade and a Shakespeare enthusiast by calling. In The Shakespeare Wars, the author articulates to a well-read lay audience his passion for the work and describes the internecine squabbling that often characterizes Shakespeare studies. In so doing, Rosenbaum comes up against a few obstacles, not the least his lengthy meditations on issues that may strike the reader as unworthy of the space devoted to them. Even the critics who admire the author's passion and his knowledge of the subject agree that the book is longer than it needs to be. If you are as captivated by Shakespeare as the author, however, join a kindred spirit in celebrating the Bard.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812978366
• ISBN-13: 978-0812978360
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #644,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 109 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In love with Shakespeare October 8, 2006

By Jim Coughenour

Format:Hardcover

This is a volume of gustatory delights -- a book you pick up on impulse and end up devouring with your meals (my copy is spotted with olive oil and specks of latte foam). Rosenbaum has written an autobiography of his obsession with Shakespeare, triggered by a conversion experience when he saw a 1970 Peter Brooks production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. One hears a bit too often about his precious handful of epiphanies, and Rosenbaum (like Harold Bloom, whom he castigates) can easily be faulted for his enthusiasm, but there's no doubt that he brings a host of seemingly desiccated academic controversies to life. Until last week I had no idea there were two versions of Lear or three versions of Hamlet, or that I could be made to care about Shakespeare's original spelling enough to order every play I could find edited by John Andrews.

In fact, reading Rosenbaum turned out to be an expensive experience. Thanks to his infectious interest and spirited recommendations (I'm tempted to say the book is worth having for its Bibliographic Notes), I've purchased Stephen Booth's old edition of the Sonnets, Ann Thompson's new edition of Hamlet, and Russ McDonald's Shakespeare and the Arts of Language -- and that was only the beginning of a ruinous week on Amazon. Rosenbaum also makes a strong case for republishing out-of-print classics such as Empson's Milton's God and Booth's Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets; I hope someone's listening.

So I award Shakespeare Wars five stars for enthusiasm -- not only its author's but that which it excites in readers like me, who generally skip those bulky Arden introductions. (Now I'll read them with gratitude.) It didn't hurt, either, that Rosenbaum champions prejudices I share: that academics besotted with Theory are like color-blind art critics; that Shylock should not be sanitized; and that Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet is spectacular, in no small part because of Harold Perrineau's Mercutio. And it's in reference to Mercutio that Rosenbaum makes one of his many excellent equations: "Mercutio as Marlowe." That's the kind of connection that sends a spark racing across the imagination and leaves its readers smiling.

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars "The shock of pleasure" April 23, 2007

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In studying and teaching the Bard, I always wonder if I am over-praising or under-estimating Shakespeare's achievement. "Is it him or is it we who are not making sense?" (524) Rosenbaum replies we are at fault. But this is a "felix culpa," a happy fault. He energetically plows through dozens of topics revolving around reactions of critics and directors of Shakespeare. This is not a biography; Rosenbaum has choice words for Stephen Greenblatt's recent "Will in the World." Rosenbaum's dogged pace shows his journalistic knack for standing outside the "public fiascos, palace coups" of his book's subtitle, the better to examine "clashing scholars." Digging in, he holds his ground against formidable experts.

He's able to summarize Stephen Bloom's rhetorical application of antanaclasis in Sonnet 40: "like pulsating alliteration, evokes a sense of insecurity, of flux, of motion..." (471) This whole book, in fact, is Rosenbaum's effort to come to grips with a day as a grad student at Yale when he first realized this disassociation, this suspension between meanings, this either-and-or-plus-more capability that he argues Shakespeare, more than any other writer ever, at his best conveys to us. Still, this "exegetical despair" at never having enough time to get to the bottom of Shakespeare's "floating signifiers" persists.

In fact, Rosenbaum's status as a drop-out from an Ivy League doctoral program in English enables him to return to textual studies, critical debates, academic cogitation, and performance anxieties with aplomb-- and perhaps a wish to settle scores with fusty scholars and fussy thespians.

I found myself certainly eager to return to my student seminar on Lear, to pick up for the first time since college Antony & Cleopatra, or to re-discover the overlooked Troilus & Cressida. But, admittedly, the amount of detail, the intricacy of the arguments, and the rapidity with which parts of this study move too quickly all present any prospective reader of "The Shakespeare Wars" (not the best title, either) with reason to reflect. This book took me over two weeks on and off, and it demands-- as is only fair given its subject-- close attention and unwavering recall.

Often Rosenbaum sets up a point that he may not return to for hundreds of pages; he takes up as an aside concerns that far ago at a later stage in his quest to uncover Shakespeare's spell. He expects more than that elusive "generally educated reader" for you need to have read the plays he talks about. No plot summaries here; he takes what is odd for a mass-market account of the drama in that he writes at a level thankfully more accessible than the usual critic (which isn't hard these days, admittedly) but nonetheless a tone that implies on every page you need to have done as nearly an intensive scrutiny of the plays as he has had the stamina, the intellect, and the passion to pursue over thirty-five years.

The high points for me were his treatment of Shylock as performed too genteely by actors today afraid to admit that Shakespeare may have been one of his time and not above it in some universalist humanism in presenting a Jewish villain. Rosenbaum confronts Steven Berkoff and Henry Goodman, both British Jewish actors who in Rosenbaum's estimation have with varying degrees of success tried to make this play and its main character still worthy of a post-1945 performance of a drama more controversial now perhaps than it presumably in Shakespeare's London. Rosenbaum's own determination to argue for the play's antisemitism as its central and essential core despite "universalist" efforts to soften its edge make for stimulating reading.

He follows with a suitable interlude showing that Shakespeare on film for us can outshine its theatrical productions today-- by virtue of close-ups, subtle vocal expression, voiceover of soliloquys, and crafting of scenes without the stage's necessity to thunder out and soldier on for hours more. He recommends Welles' Falstaff, Burton's Hamlet, Olivier's Richard III, and Brook's Lear above all else. To his credit, he gives fair space to Harold Perrineau's stunning Mercutio in Luhrmann's Romeo; on the other hand he barely mentions Taymor's Titus, Parker's Othello, Branagh's Hamlet & Henry or Almeyredra's Hamlet although he seems to like much in them at their best. Not to mention his lack of explanation of what's good and bad in the 1980s BBC TV series that filmed for the first time the entire set of plays. Much more is needed than what his film chapter gives.

Too often, Rosenbaum mentions asides that to me proved more appealing than his main examples. I never figured out what adds up from Brook's "Secret Play" concept or the cumulative effect on stage of Cic Berry's vocal experiments in rehearsals. The Socinian heresy may have much to suggest about Merchant and Empson in "Milton's God" had much to provide about the Doctrine of Christian Satisfaction, but Rosenbaum raises such points only to then rush past them in his determination to transcribe yet another interview with an actor or director. These conversations are often enlightening, but there lurks an understandable if still awkward tendency of the journalist to put himself too forward as the antagonist, the devil's advocate, the naysayer.

There are places, as with his demolishment of Harold Bloom's ridiculous claims for Falstaff as the epitome of Shakespeare's "invention of the human" as we have inherited his conceptual paradigm, where he seems to have that personal agenda come out too much. Revenge for those Yale sherry parties when he witnessed his classmates fawning over Bloom is understandable. But it does undermine the intellectual rigor of his critique of that orotund mandarin.

Unfortunately, this hefty and handsomely designed book lacks any way to track down quotations from his sources. Bibliographic endnotes are engrossing, but the lack of specific citations for hundreds of quotes is disappointing in a book that tries to connect a wider audience to insider debates. Despite an imperfect result, this is one of the rare books that bridges the gap between the ranks of (in the phrase of one of them, Linda Charnes) "yuppie guerrilla academics" and the rest of us. Rosenbaum, for all this book's unevenness and exhausting mass of half-digested material, cares about getting us to share his enthusiasm. Pleasure-- how rarely do we find this concept at the heart of a critic's search for aesthetic wonder? Grace, infinitude, love, sea change, the abyss, forgiveness, transport outside of ourselves: Rosenbaum seeks the source of his "reader reception" by hunting down everyone he can who may guide him to the elusive source of Shakespeare's power and control over him-- and, he urges, if we wish to follow him, Shakespeare's trail blazed for us.

I don't understand, apropos, why Rosenbaum agrees with an assertion that we are the last generation who will be able to comprehend Shakespeare's language before it becomes as antiquated and inaccessible as is Chaucer's Middle English to non-specialists. He raises this point, typically, but never elaborates on it. He raves about Kevin Kline's Falstaff but skims over how Kline's acting in part 2 of Henry IV alters from part 1: a topic that previously Rosenbaum insists upon for many detailed pages. Too often, Rosenbaum seems so excited about his adventure that he forgets we have a hard time keeping up with his dash.

He's no Bardolator. Rather, he wishes us to uncover the intensity of what we read and witness as "the language of thought" as it emerges onto paper or into the spotlights. He argues for what matters in Shakespeare as an aesthetic achievement-- in fact one more apparent to those of us outside today's academy. We may be mocked by those claiming "the institutionalist debunking of the bourgeois subject" from ivory towers to speak rather for the oppressed. I teach some of these less- privileged, literarily-challenged students every day, far from the Ivy League. I'd ask Charnes: how should I teach them Shakespeare? How explain his appeal to the person next to me on the bus? Getting "ordinary folks" to understand a bit of Shakespeare's art brings the original aim of the playwright home. As one critic mentions, anyone can experience the complex reactions Rosenbaum or critics or directors know. The only difference is that the professionals know how to articulate it, and can re-experience it with increasingly adept awareness. What Wordsworth labelled as simultaneous dissassociation and association: this quality marks Shakespeare's inexhaustible, endlessly renewable "moral complexity" as well as artistic achievement.

The inexhaustability of good art may sound old-fashioned, but Rosenbaum near the opening of his book shows how Shakespeare rewards our investment-- with compound interest. For many people today, accustomed to obvious presentation of vapid messages, Shakespeare may nudge them out of their shell. They are often scared of him. Rosenbaum likewise demystifies Shakespeare for a wider audience. He understands the academic arguments and translates their findings to those of us whom scholarly articles and learned books may rarely reach: the common reader.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A fun read for everyone (scholar or not) November 27, 2006

By Polymath-In-Training

Format:Hardcover

First the downside. The way the author writes. In incomplete sentences. Frequently. Like the journalist he is.

Putting that irritating habit aside, the author gives an inside look at the disagreements among Shakespearean scholars, and those agreements are many and varied. He includes enough introduction and background information that average readers, like me, can understand the issue and hand. The author, who is both a journalist and a literature scholar, writes an interesting series of stories. Through interviews with some of the world's top Shakespearean researchers, he sifts through all the dross and provides a definite opinion on most topics. He writes about topics that much of the public will be familiar with, and he writes about many that I've never heard of.

Best of all, this book has spurred me to read a few of Shakespeare's plays, watch films of some of the plays, and read his sonnets.